


That Subtle Knot

by apple_pi



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-25
Updated: 2011-02-25
Packaged: 2017-10-15 22:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apple_pi/pseuds/apple_pi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I wonder. Does an angel get his wings when the bell is set off by a demon?</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Subtle Knot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [veronamay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/veronamay/gifts).



Aziraphale heard the bell over the door tinkle and then give a high-pitched squeal, before cutting off abruptly. It reminded him unpleasantly of the sound rabbits make as they’re killed by dogs, and the angel frowned at his book, refusing to look up.

“I like that bell,” Crowley said, sauntering into the back room. “I wonder. Does an angel get his wings when the bell is set off by a demon?” He lounged against the table, resting one lean, denim-clad buttock quite near where Aziraphale’s book lay.

“Sentimental tripe,” Aziraphale said, still not looking up. “The sign says _Closed_ , you know.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Crowley replied, the smirk clearly audible. “Let’s go and eat something sinful at the Ritz.”

Aziraphale bit his lip. And looked up, finally, to meet the yellow eyes behind Crowley’s sunglasses. “I can’t.”

Crowley’s smile was gone like a blown-out candle flame. “What’s wrong?”

“I just – I can’t,” Aziraphale said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “That’s all.”

Crowley took off the sunglasses.

“That’s bloody well not all,” he said, voice low and harsh. “You’ve heard from Upstairs, haven’t you? What have you heard?”

Aziraphale’s hands flattened on the pages of his book; he relaxed them with an effort and smoothed the paper down gently. “I had to go up for a report, and, no. I didn’t hear anything. I think.” He looked down at the book, fingertips covering words in a language very few could read, these days. “They want me back for a follow-up in a week. I think they know about, erm, us. And I.” He blinked quickly at his hands. “I don’t want to.” He couldn’t finish the sentence.

“You don’t want to fall,” Crowley said; his voice was flat, and Aziraphale looked quickly up at him.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “Not for – not for this.”

“Not for me.”

Crowley looked hurt. Aziraphale’s heart, that most sensitive and well-developed of organs, contracted painfully. Crowley, Crowley should never be hurt, Aziraphale thought, and he reached out to touch him, to lay his hand on Crowley’s thigh, to try to _explain_ –

“Not for anyone or anything,” Aziraphale whispered. “I am what I am, you knew that. You _know_ that.”

Crowley stood, and Aziraphale’s soft hand slid off his leg, falling to his side. “Well, then, I’ll just be off,” he said, and the sadness was gone, vanished just as the smile had done. Crowley’s face looked hard, and cold, and rather as if he was forcing himself to look one way when really he almost looked another. He slid his sunglasses back onto his nose, and even that illusion was gone, or maybe the new illusion was just more complete: Crowley did not care, Crowley was fine.

“I’ll see you around, angel,” the demon said, and this time the bell didn’t ring so much as grate and jangle.

Aziraphale ventured into the shop proper a few minutes later and found it on the floor, a twisted bit of metal that wouldn’t ring again without celestial help. He mended it with a sigh and a pass of his hand, and pulled a stepladder near to refasten it over the door. He didn’t turn the sign to “Open,” though; he sat on the ladder beneath the faintly chiming bell and stared out the dusty Venetian blinds at the street, empty of Bentleys and demons and anything of interest.

 

“We could just be friends,” Aziraphale said to the ducks.

“Quack,” they replied.

He threw them more bread crumbs. “I think he’s angry at me, though.”

They didn’t reply at all this time, but one of them sank.

Aziraphale buoyed it up and tried not to look too delighted when he turned to look at Crowley. “That’s really not nice,” he said.

“I’m really not nice,” Crowley said, sounding subdued.

“I know,” Aziraphale said. “You’re quite wicked, my dear.” He’d meant to reassure, but Crowley’s lips thinned.

“You haven’t been keeping up with your thwarting,” the demon said. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his slick black coat. “I’ve done four hundred and thirty-two wicked things this week, and you haven’t thwarted any of them.”

Aziraphale tossed the last of his bread to the ducks, then crumpled the paper bag and put it neatly into a rubbish bin. “I’ve done plenty of thwarting,” he said. “Or rather, I’ve been, er, promoting goodness separately. I decided a more proactive approach would be useful.”

“What do you mean?” Crowley narrowed his eyes. Aziraphale could always tell, even through the sunglasses.

“I mean... Well, it’s always you, going around being wicked, and then I have to trail around and thwart, and I’m tired of always going second.” He sounded peevish in his own ears, but that was probably all right, since what he really felt was the desire to make Crowley happy, and he knew that Crowley’s four hundred and thirty-two acts of devilry had been (a) mostly half-hearted and (b) hardly more than encouraging people’s innate wickedness, and therefore negligible on the scale of importance, thwarting-wise. “So I thought maybe I should go about, doing, ehm, doing good, and you could thwart me. For once.”

Crowley was looking at him as though Aziraphale had suddenly sprouted horns. “You thought that.”

“I, er.” Aziraphale ran one hand cautiously over his forehead, pretending to fluff his hair. No horns. “Yes.”

Crowley raised one eyebrow. “You are the most wretched liar it has ever been my displeasure to come across,” he drawled.

Aziraphale felt his face burn and he looked blindly at the ducks’ feathery behinds; they’d dispersed when it became clear that no more Heavenly largesse would be forthcoming. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Crowley was smiling. “At least you’re trying.”

“I’m an _angel_ ,” Aziraphale said weakly. “I shouldn’t even try.”

“There may be hope for you yet,” Crowley said.

“I miss you,” Aziraphale said abruptly.

Crowley turned his face toward the lake. “That’s a shabby attempt,” he said after a moment.

“At what?”

“A falsehood,” Crowley said lightly.

“You’re a _marvelous_ liar,” Aziraphale said, his pleasure in seeing the demon evaporating abruptly.

“I haven’t said anything,” Crowley protested, turning toward him again. Crowley’s hands were stuffed into his pockets, and Aziraphale wondered if it meant something, that the demon had so carelessly disrupted the line of his sharply cut trousers. “At least give me a chance to prove my capabilities.”

“No,” Aziraphale said. “I think you’ve done that already.”

Crowley didn’t say anything for a while, and his sunglasses faced the placid waters of the lake.

“I went and gave my report yesterday,” Aziraphale said, finally.

“Oh?”

“They didn’t ask me about... you.” Aziraphale tried to keep the tremor from his voice, but he wasn’t at all certain that he succeeded. “They commended me for something I had nothing to do with, and told me about a few miracles they’d like to see happen in the next few decades, and said I’d not need to report back for a century or so.”

Crowley looked at him and Aziraphale reminded himself that Crowley had been an angel once, and he, Aziraphale, should really not be taken in by good cheekbones and the fact that some last vestige of angelic beauty still hung about the demon’s smile, so that now, when he smiled, it was only fifty percent wicked and oh, dear.

Crowley stepped closer. “We could do a lot in a century,” Crowley said, and the wickedness was in the lead by fifty-one percent, and increasing the gap.

 _I’m mixing my metaphors wretchedly_ , Aziraphale thought. “No,” he blurted out, and Crowley stepped back as though he’d been slapped, his cheeks reddening to bear out the comparison.

“In that case,” he said, and turned on his heel.

“No!” Aziraphale cried, and it didn’t matter at all that he’d meant it, intended to stop this madness with his adversary, his friend, his lover. It didn’t matter at all. “Stop,” he said, and lunged forward, hand curling over Crowley’s shoulder, pulling him back, turning him.

“If you’ve finished humiliating yourself, angel, I’ve people to twist and places to destroy,” Crowley growled, turning his head away, teeth bared.

Aziraphale jerked him closer, hardly aware that humans might be watching. “Please don’t,” he said, and lifted his free hand – the one not fisted in Crowley’s black silk shirt – to touch the demon’s chin, to turn his face back toward Aziraphale.

Crowley refused the touch, the unspoken request. “It’s my job,” he said. “It’s my _nature._ ” The last word was snarled, and Crowley shivered under Aziraphale’s hand.

It felt like revulsion, and Aziraphale’s eyes filled. “I’m afraid,” he said, and released Crowley’s shirt, though he kept his palm against the demon’s ruddy cheek.

“Of what?” the demon spat. “You’ve been given a century, one hundred years to do as you please.” He looked at Aziraphale, finally, anger and desire tangled in his expression.

“You,” Aziraphale said. “And myself – what I am when I’m with you.”

He dropped his hands and stood, vulnerable and open as he always was, as he could never stop being. He waited for Crowley, as (he thought for the first time, surprised) Crowley must have waited for him – for decades, perhaps centuries.

“You’re never anything but yourself,” Crowley said bitterly. “Don’t you know that?” He ducked his head and pulled the sunglasses from his face. His eyes, when they met Aziraphale’s, weren’t golden, they weren’t beautiful. They were flat and yellow, the unreadable eyes of a snake. “You’re so worried about falling – it’s bullshit,” he said, the obscenity startling from a creature who so seldom bothered to curse with such commonplaces. “You can no more fall than I can rise again.”

“What if you’re wrong?” Aziraphale asked. His face was hot, limbs tense beneath the clothing he’d put on that morning; he was uncomfortably aware of his body, as he usually was not. Only Crowley could, so far in Aziraphale’s experience, make him so very aware of his own body and what it wanted. “The road to Hell really is paved with good intentions, no matter what some people say to the contrary.”

Crowley looked down, dark lashes hiding that reptilian gaze. He was still for a moment, and then he sidled closer, though he would not look at Aziraphale.

“Listen, angel,” he said, and Aziraphale was gratified that his wasn’t the only voice that was shaky. “Listen,” the demon said again. “I want you. I want to own you, to possess you. Yes,” he looked up at Aziraphale’s sharp breath, “you know what that means, what it’s always meant. I want it. Again.” He peered at Aziraphale for an instant, then looked past him, across the green waters of the pond. “You want me because you’re an angel, and you love me. It’s your nature.” He stressed the word. “I want you because I’m a demon, and I lust for you. That’s mine.”

He was so close now that Aziraphale could smell him: the musk of his human body, the tang of _otherness_ that always marked him – _whiff of brimstone_ , Crowley had said once: grinning, naked, sated in Aziraphale’s bed.

“Don’t,” Crowley said now. “Don’t make it more than it must be.”

Aziraphale hesitated. “Simplicity can be a great evil,” he ventured at last. “Black and white, right and wrong.”

Crowley appeared torn between a smile and a snarl, settling for a grimace in the end. “S’what got us into all that mess,” he said, referring, of course, to the unfortunate matter of the almost-end-of-the-world. Tacit agreement.

“What I mean is,” Aziraphale paused yet again, and wondered what good intelligence and experience were in the face of what lay tangled between the demon and himself. “What I mean is, neither you nor I are as simple as we once were, my dear. It’s foolish to pretend otherwise. Although,” he added, seeing Crowley’s mouth open, “tempting. Quite tempting.”

This was a sop, and Crowley knew it of course, but he closed his mouth again, and his eyes were translucent in the late afternoon sunlight. “I have my pride,” Crowley said, looking at Aziraphale’s shoulder, or thereabouts. “I won’t ask you for... anything.”

“You’ve never asked,” Aziraphale said, with rather more acid than he’d intended, but Crowley just smiled. ( _Sharper than a serpent’s tooth_ , Aziraphale thought, and immediately wished that his body would stop distracting him with memories of Crowley’s teeth doing certain things to it. To him.) “You have pride,” Aziraphale said, “and greed, and envy, and lust.”

“You flatter me,” Crowley said, and the grin grew that much sharper; Aziraphale reminded himself that breathing might not be necessary, but was helpful. Crowley was a hairsbreadth from him, now, heat radiating from his body, the thin wash of his flush spreading to Aziraphale through mere proximity, it would seem.

“I tell the truth,” the angel said, trying for dignity, but he suspected he’d achieved primness. Crowley was far too close, really, and Aziraphale wished for poise. There were no wings large enough, however, to keep him on balance around this particular demon, and Aziraphale knew that Crowley would, once again, have things all his way, because Crowley’s lips were moving, practically brushing Aziraphale’s cheek as he spoke:

“Come home with me, angel,” the demon said, and Aziraphale pretended there was no flutter in his voice as he sighed as though put upon.

“You could say _please_ ,” he said, but he turned his head and cautiously pressed a kiss to Crowley’s smug, smiling mouth.

Crowley’s hand skated down the angel’s back, and then he was gone – he stepped away, slipping his sunglasses back into place, unruffled. He stuffed his hands into his pockets again, though, and didn’t look at Aziraphale as he replied. “No, I really couldn’t.” He began walking.

Aziraphale fell into step with him. “Maybe later you will, though,” he murmured under his breath, and did not bother to hide his relief and delight when the demon’s head whipped around toward him.


End file.
